During the thousand years which Doctor Washington says that the Latins have done less than the negroes have done in thirty, Spain rose into world-power, dominated the European Continent, shook England’s throne to its base, broke the Turkish scimiter in the great sea-fight of Lepanto, evolved a splendid literature, reached the highest development in the Fine Arts, launched Columbus upon his voyage into unknown seas to test the suggestion of another Latin—Toscanelli—and thus took the first daring step in that marvelous chapter of Discovery whose sober facts are grander and stranger than Romance. Has the learned Doctor ever studied the history of Mexico—the Latin country south of us? Since a foreign yoke was thrown off and Mexico “found herself,” what country has made nobler progress? The negro in Santo Domingo has had a hundred years of freedom; Mexico scarce half so many; _yet compare the Mexico of today with the Santo Domingo of today._ Left to themselves, the Latins of Mexico have built up a magnificent civilization. Left to themselves, the negroes of Santo Domingo have destroyed what the French had already built. _In Mexico conditions get better, year after year._ _In Santo Domingo conditions grow worse, year after year._ If the learned Doctor wants to make a study in contrasts, let him first read “Where Black Rules White,” by Hesketh Prichard, and then read “The Awakening of a Nation,” by Charles F. Lummis, and I venture to say that some of his cocky self-complacency as to the superiority of the negroes over the whites will ooze out of him. * * * * * As to Italy—can it be that Italy has done less in a thousand years than the negroes have done in thirty? The greatest man that ever lived was of Italian extraction. Taine says that Napoleon was a true Italian in character and intellect. If that be true, then _the two greatest men the world ever saw_ were Latins. Wherever the civilized man lives today his environment, his thoughts, his ideals, his achievements are more or less influenced by the life and work of Cæsar and Napoleon. If any two men may be said to have created the material modern world those two Latins did it. If modern Europe is any one man, it is Napoleon. His laws, schools—social, political, financial, educational institutions—have wrung from rulers ever since the homage of imitation. In literature how illustrious is Italy? It was Petrarch who was “the Columbus of a new spiritual atmosphere, the discoverer of modern culture.” It was he who broke away from monkish medievalism, created the humanistic impulse, treated “man as a rational being apart from theological determination,” modernizing literature. The “short story” writers of fiction—Edgar Poe, Guy de Maupassant and Kipling—had their teacher in Boccaccio and his _novella_. Modern history traces its methods, its spirit and its form to Villani, Guicciardini, and that wonderful type of Latin genius, Machiavelli.